Startup Has Big Plans for Tiny Chip Technology

Not many people these days propose radically new ideas for microprocessors, a costly business with big, entrenched competitors. Andreas Olofsson is doing it anyway.

Adapteva

Adapteva’s Andreas Olofsson

The Swedish-born entrepreneur, founder and CEO of a startup called Adapteva, is discussing plans this week to add a new kind of circuitry to chips--vastly increasing their ability to solve certain kinds of mathematics problems.

Where today's general-purpose microprocessors might have one to eight calculating engines, Adapteva expects to fit 64 of its tiny, specialized processors on a typical cellphone chip--and potentially nearly 1,000 cores in other cases. Using a next-generation production process, Olofsson thinks adding 4,000 electronic brains to a chip will be no problem.

Besides performance advantages, Olofsson says the circuitry is ten times more energy-efficient than comparable chip designs from ARM Holdings, the standard in smartphones and other mobile applications because of low power consumption. "People are pretty incredulous about the technology," he says.

Keep in mind that Adapteva has no illusions about replacing microprocessors such as those developed by ARM or Intel, or taking jobs from graphics specialists Nvidia or Advanced Micro Devices. After all, programmers have spent decades making software that exploits those chips. Nor does it intend to design and sell entire chips itself.

Rather, Adapteva plans to license designs for circuitry that could be combined with existing building blocks to help cellphone chips speed through so-called floating point calculations that now often require large computers. Such mathematics functions can help in facial recognition, speech recognition and chores that involve sifting through large volumes of data to match patterns, Olofsson says.

Some of the earliest applications could be in aerospace and defense, the specialty of a company called BittWare that plans to use Adapteva's chips on circuit boards and sell them. For example, Olofsson says, the technology could be used to help process video signals from reconnaissance drone aircraft alongside a more conventional chip called a field programmable gate array.

Olofsson, a veteran of chip makers Analog Devices and Texas Instruments, says venture capitalists have been particularly incredulous with how little money Adapteva has needed to refine its approach since its founding in 2008--just $1.5 million, compared with typical estimates of as much as $100 million to get a chip startup established.

Olofsson gives partial credit to existing open-source operating systems and other software that can be used free of charge. Then there's the fact that Adapteva, which is based in Lexington, Mass., has just four full-time engineers.